PKD Otaku Issue 27 - Philip K. Dick Fan Site

Dick himself has acknowledged this connection to Bester.
In Bester’s novel a telepathic police force has
eliminated murder from society, but a man wishes to kill
another. How he does it and how he covers it up are the
two things on which the story hinges. In wep-tech terms
these correspond to the weapon and its
camouflage. I won’t go deeper into THE
DEMOLISHED MAN nor divulge the plot;
this is a science fiction classic we all
should read and I won’t spoil it for the
reader who has yet to enjoy the story.
But, these two problems of weapon and
concealment are what PKD deals with in
SOLAR LOTTERY.
The weapon used in the assassination
attempt on Leon Cartwright – the
Prestonite fanatic twitched by The Bottle
to Director of the nine-planet Federation
– is as crude as necessary to get the job
done: a thumb gun installed in the hand
of the assassin, Keith Pellig. This thumb
gun burns gaping holes through anything
in Pellig’s way and, no doubt, would burn
Cartwright to ash in similar fashion – if Pellig can reach
him. The concealment of the weapon lies in its delivery
system: Keith Pellig. Even though he has the appearance
of a non-descript man Pellig is actually a robot camouflaged
as a man.
The defenses arrayed against this assassin reduce
to almost total reliance on the Telepathic Corps, the institutionalized
protector of the Federation Director, which,
secure in its mind-reading powers, initially is unconcerned
with any assassin. However, they are bamboozled when
Pellig comes in range and are helpless to stop his advance.
This is because, being a robot, Pellig is operated by
a group of special technicians who are switched into control
of the robot at random. This fast switching of minds
confuses the Telepathic Corps and renders them useless.
What does this plot show us about PKD’s thinking
in 1954 about weapons technology? The thumb gun is as
basic as it gets: an emitter of a powerful burning energy
beam. It could be a snub-nosed .44 revolver. Just get it in
range to do its killing thing. Weapon dismissed. It’s not
the weapon that does the killing, it’s the person, or in this
case, robot, pressing the trigger mechanism.
The assassin, Pellig, is controlled by the outgoing
Federation Director, Reese Verrick, and his corps of technicians.
He is designed for the specific purpose of defeating
the Telepathic Corps. In essence Pellig is the weapon.
Is this a characteristic of weapons in general? Is the spear
designed to defeat the shield? Or the tank to defeat the
machine gun? And this is where I wish I’d went to West
Point when I wasn’t offered the opportunity as surely this
is the sort of thing they would study there. What comes
first, the weapon or the defense? I suppose they arise
mutually although advances in weapons technology suggest
a time lag between offense and an upgraded defense
although the reverse is also true. The air war in Europe
in 1914-18 is one example of this with rapid counter-balancing
progress in flight technology and
aerial tactics.
PKD’s idea of switching control of Pellig
among a group of technicians with the
purpose of killing one man is similar to
our modern Predator drones with their
control rooms full of technicians.
In our military drones we have the problem
of weapons concealment and delivery
conquered, our drones are high in the
sky, our missiles unstoppable. What we
have difficulty with is finding the target.
Where a faction cannot match force with
force the first defence is to run away, and
if you can’t run then you can hide. Instead
of fortresses loaded with boiling oil and
rocks to repel invaders any technologically
weak aggressor is nowadays dispersed
like the French Underground in World War 2. This renders
the dominant power’s advantage inefficient: a tank sent
to rout a nest of Molotov cocktail wielding partisans, or
a $10,000,000 drone operation to eliminate a terrorist
leader. Soon the superior side’s forces are spread thin and
the cost to maintain them becomes prohibitive.
There are two offensive replies available when
faced with a dispersed enemy. The second is the one our
nation has adopted against Al Qaida, the inefficient one of
drones targeting individuals. The first is that used by Adolf
Hitler in World War 2: reprisals, blanket area destruction,
total brutality. Its amazing how resistance crumbles when
you round up a whole town and shoot everyone in it or
bomb a city to ashes and rubble just because a few dared
to oppose you. The ultimate superiority of these strategies,
the one over the other, has yet to be decided but I
think our modern targeted approach will be the best once
we can reduce the costs of the hardware. After all, Hitler
lost and even his most brutal action, the destruction of
Warsaw, failed when the survivors of that valiant city rose
from the smoke and rubble and threw off their oppressors.
Today war is different than it used to be even as
recently as World War 2. The definition of war itself has
changed. It used to mean total national commitment to
defeating the enemy by all and every means available. Today,
it is something less than that, today, it is, well, we
don’t want to hurt anyone because then we’ll look bad on
TV. We cannot bomb Kabul or Islamabad out of existence
because we just don’t want to. And at this point we’ve
reached the nut of civilization’s problem: finding an op-
25 ‘You’re just trying to re-establish balance in an unbalanced world.’